THE TASK:

1. OPS CENTER |EVALUATE

I was contracted at John Deere to develop the future technology of the Operations Center with some goals in mind.

2. UNITY  | DEVELOPE

  • Allow farmers and farming operations managers to have more insight into their fields.
  • ​Combine many data layers to tell a time based story.

3. MEET FARMERS  | ANALYSIS

​ Engineer's test prototype.
  • Avg farm owners are 60 yrs old. They don't like 1st person shooter controls
  • Burdens the farmer/user with installations of an executable

4. BABYLON |DESIGN

Use Babylon 3D as a in browser gaming engine to emulate the work we did on Unity Project the team worked on prior.
  • simpler, easier NAVIGATION CONTROL but a more powerful and useful way to visualize their data.

5. MEET FARMERS | VALIDATE

  • Farmers had a positive response over the previous version

6. LOOP CYCLE | EVALUATE AGAIN

  • SUCCESS
  • Farmers want to know what to do first and pull up their historical data.
  • Find their data layers

7. COACHMARKS |DESIGN

FIRST TIME USER FLOW TRIGGERS EVENT
We use the same components as the John Deere Design Library the users are already familiar with. This is a quick win.
When complete, these coachmarks will not show up again unless the user requests for it again in the help section. On the backend, the USER is marked completing the NEW FEATURE path.
SPOTLIGHTING SPECIFIC FEATURES
This is how we green lit features in a few short sprints starting with what was the most problematic for our farmers.

3D UX DESIGN A NEW FEATURE - LAYER SELECTION: MY PROCESS

I have to get creative on how to show the developers how I want users to highlight layers under the soil from soil moisture at various levels, where there is an irrigation system, what does the pesticide spray information looks, ect.
Here i used photoshop to remove the background and imported my alpha layer into Figma. Now I can render concepts of how I want to do depth selection. 
In PHOTOSHOP, I can make transparent layers and put a glow on it. By darkening the background or putting a MASK on it, I can bring focus to the selected Layer

AR PROJECT INTEGRATION

Simultaneously I was also tasked to visualize an augmented reality experience tied to the same project. Here I am depicting how AR glasses can show areas sprayed by pesticides and tank mix. I was pitching for having event playbacks of the tractor/sprayers covering the field at specific events. This was a very hard project to do as getting accurate GPS data to match our tablets/goggles was extremely buggy. However we could take the api and data to plug these features into the 3D map Ops Center.
AR Spray heat map.
Spray event playback in 3D

References

Mark Tse
​2016